an ASS out of U and ME

Papa Tummillo sat in his recliner in his Garfield, New Jersey home, visually ensconced in an ailing early-90’s New York Mets team that had recently been swept by a slew of mediocre National League teams. We sat and watched the hard-working Italian drink his White Grenache and verbally abuse the television set. It appeared to us that the TV was an active, living participant in the room, being yelled at in a similar way that one of us would be yelled at for chewing with our mouths full. He was the “crazy,” yelling grandpa, full of passion and love for his family. We feared him but we knew that he loved us all unconditionally. We always respected his ritualistic chant-laden stints in the living room when the Mets were on the tube by keeping our distance.

At that time, Darryl Strawberry was my hero- a lanky, athletic ballplayer that would kick his knee up and effortlessly smash baseballs out of Shea stadium. I idolized how he played the game. He had a certain style and grace that I had never seen anyone else exhibit during my early childhood. I collected all of his baseball cards, had posters of him strewn about the walls of my bedroom… I loved the Mets and I wanted to be “Straw.” My late grandfather was hurling obscenities at the television set just as effortlessly as Darryl was throwing players out at home plate. Whereas I initially thought he was attacking the TV set, and not the little characters playing the game within it, I inevitably found out that his abusive words were directed at my favorite player. What were these words? What did they mean? I was taken back, truly confused… Darryl had been an all-star, and arguably one of the fiercest sluggers in the game.



Papa T asked me why I rooted for a “mulignon.” I didn’t understand at the time that the Italian term meant “eggplant.” Upon my own youthful naivety, and coupled with my geographically isolated existence in a suburban-rural area, I never made the connection to a vegetable resembling a black baseball player. Darryl Strawberry was black, but he was not a vegetable. We were white. Were we cauliflowers? We all loved a team that had many black players and white players on it… I didn’t even know what racism was. I never knew that racism existed in my world. What the hell did this all mean? Needless to say, racism was a part of my family. Sadly, it was a part of my memories as a child.

A few years later, my older brother Pete told me a story about a remark one of his classmates made to him, which finally explained to me what racism really was. Pete had been wearing a “cross-colors” Malcolm X t-shirt, and a brash Sussex County farmhand called him “Kunta Kinte” in front of their teacher and other classmates. Some other local yokels jumped on the ignorance bandwagon, laughing and high-fiving each other. Pete explained to me that the kids who were laughing were just as guilty as the kid who made the snide remark. The teacher didn’t do anything about it either; no detention was given and not even a verbal warning was issued. Realistically, it wasn’t uncommon for a racist remark to be made in Wantage township, for the pockets of conservatism at the time were well in-tact. This was an area that was traditionally “rural,” which had never previously seen such a huge migration of people from the suburban and urban areas of the tri-state area. Inherent in this influx and sprawl was an oppositional tendency to demean any newcomers that were formerly alien to the area. I even heard rumors that the KKK organized meetings in a field nearby my house. Although this was never proven or personally witnessed, I wouldn’t doubt that it happened.

By the time I got to high school, I was somewhat well-learned in distinguishing this uninformed behavior from rational and acceptable behavior. In fact, one of my closest friends on the High Point Wildcats basketball team was a black student that moved to our town from Harlem named Hector Fuentes. He was one of the six black kids that went to our high school (out of around 1,200 students). Luckily, my parents (who both came from racist households) were former archetypal Vietnam War protesting, Woodstock hippies that met in college during the civil rights movement. They embodied racial equality and made damned sure their kids prescribed to it as well. They were also both teachers, and generally had an unbridled respect and appreciation for children born of all ethnicities, religions, and race. Their kids in school were treated like their kids at home, and it wasn’t a surprise that my brother heavily resented his racist peers and that I subsequently followed suit in staying as far as I could from similar kids in my grade. I understood that racist kids in my town were most likely doing what their parents did- following suit as I was- yet in contrast, deploying a most grave and orthodox racist outlook. Papa Tummillo hated Darryl Strawberry, but not because he couldn’t hit… because he had black skin. I would not let that kind of outlook advocate my way of life. To me, Straw was an awesome baseball player. In a matter of two generations, racism subsided through knowledge of equality. It started with my parents, and my brothers and I peered through a different lens than my grandfather had.

Hector told me a lot about Harlem, and we discussed the differences between the inner-city environment and the rural foothills of Northwestern New Jersey. I admired how much he knew about me, and also about how little I knew about him. Although I knew to refrain from racism, I still didn’t know much about inner-city culture. My discussions with Hector were always highly enlightening, because urban areas were so peripherally located in my mind. I knew they existed, but I never really knew what to assume about their characteristics. They were tangential and therefore intangible. Fortunately, on the long bus rides to and from games, I was able to view Hector as a friend and not as some marginal animal from an area I would never dare hang out in. As he brought urban ideology closer to me and made it tangible, I realized how similar we actually were. He was black and I was white, surely; and yet we both loved basketball, mountain dew, and Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy.”

Urban society as portrayed through the lens of television/film and music was previously my only outlet to the “realities” of seemingly exotic places like Harlem. I once figured Hector’s life resembled an Ice Cube video, or perhaps Boys In Da’ Hood. He used to joke with me that I was the “whitest friend” he had, and that I was widely misinformed about life “on the streets.” I assumed everything Hollywood told me about urban youth was Hector. He was “Out of control, loud, disobedient, violent and addicted to drugs… no family values… rejected the dominant social institutions” (Bulman 257). Hector was quick to point out my immature perceptions, because he was everything BUT the aforementioned generalizations. He also made me feel comforted for not knowing any better, because he knew that I never had been to Harlem. I found it really hard to understand anything I never experienced, and I find that to be a common reality I am still struggling with to this day.

This was NOT Hector's life:


Following high school, I attended William Paterson University in Wayne. Upon my first visit there I knew I was in for a “culture-shock.” For the first time in my life, I lived away from the security of home- in a town right up the hill from Paterson. As I skateboarded past a group of black kids on my first day of class, one guy called me “Marty McFly.” I wasn’t mad, though. I kept Hector in mind, for this was something he would have said to me too. I actually laughed out loud and went on with my business. This was a situation similar to how my brother was called a “Kunta Kinte,” but I felt oddly relieved to be the minority for once. Like Hector, I supplanted myself from an environment I was used to. I was removed from my comfort factor, and this instability simultaneously frightened and awakened me. For the first time in my life, I was aware that I was white. As Lisa Delpit claims, I belonged to a “culture of power.” I had never previously had to assimilate into other cultures; in becoming conscious of this, I never knew how to acculturate others into my culture. I had the power and privilege, led anxiously by a lack of experience anywhere else than within myself: “Those with power are frequently least aware of- or least willing to acknowledge- its existence. Those with less power are often aware of its existence” (Delpit 569). This is why Hector knew me, and why I didn’t know him. This is why I laughed at being called “Marty McFly,” and perhaps why I never dared to call a Hector a “mulignon.”

I narrowly escaped the ignorance entrenched in my immediate family and detached area I grew up in. I have learned by doing, and simply by doing, I became unbroken to racism and power-struggles. I am also a product of my experiences; therefore, I carry these experiences with me as a candidate for teaching. In a similar way to how Hector taught me, I feel that teaching will provide me an outlet to foster equality to upcoming generations of culturally naïve students. I have considered teaching to be the extension of some prophetic, existential calling. W.E.B. Dubois, one of the most iconic models for such thought, once stated, “Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.” My assumptions and experiences have made me consider and reconsider the profession of teaching; they have also brought immediacy to the action of teaching in an inner-city area. In a similar way to how Dubois called for action today, I base my hope and participation in urban education today.

Like I mentioned briefly before, I never knew Harlem because I had never really been there. Also, I never knew the people of Harlem because I had never really met anyone until I met Hector Fuentes. Although I have done my best to prepare myself for the differences and similarities of urban areas and their inhabitants, I will never really know what to expect until I act within and with the areas and inhabitants. I must take what I believe with me, but still be flexible to new understandings of teaching in an urban area. As Martin Haberman offers, “Schooling is living, not preparation for living. And living is a constant messing with the problems that seem to resist solution” (Haberman 5). What if I have the chance to teach the next generation’s Darryl Strawberry? Regardless of any newfound and exotic urban area I come into contact with, I must accept that all children should be guaranteed an education. I should always embrace teaching as an ongoing problem that resists solution.

References:
* Bulman, Robert. “Teachers in the ‘Hood: Hollywood’s Middle-Class Fantasy”
* Delpit, Lisa. “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children”
* Haberman, Martin. “The Pedagogy of Poverty Versus Good Teaching”